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I Men's No 9808F Oty Size Women's No. 9817F I Oty Size I Total $ I DCheck DVISA DMC DAmEx DDC/CS Card # I Exp Phone I Name I Add ress I City I State Zip L_-wm:PJ_@;j -'" P oint Blank, the newsletter of the Cit- izens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, praised the Kennesaw ordinance, calling it "a solid counter to the Morton Grove handgun ban," and added, "The fight goes on around the country." And so it did. "KEN- NESAW-TYPE GUN LAW SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE," declared a headline in the newspaper Gun Week in July of 1982. "Such laws have now been passed in Kennesaw, Franklintown, Pa., Hollister, Mo., Chiloquin, Ore., and Palmer, 111.," the accompanying story pointed out. "They are being considered in a number of towns, in- cluding Oroville, Calif., Bliss, Idaho, and Taylorville, IlL" And a number of other localities have since proposed or adopted gun codes similar to Ken- nesaw's. The news was a clear sign that the N.R.A. and its allies had recovered from the shock of Morton Grove. I N September of 1983, Michael Korda, a novelist and publishing- house editor in N ew York, wrote an article for the N.R.A.'s Reports from Washington in which he agreed with some of the N.R.A.'s positions on gun control. The association also ran Korda's article, under the heading "Guns Are Not the Problem," as an advertisement in a number of maga- zines, including T he New Republic- presumably because Korda's cre- dentials are those of an urban intellec- tual, because urban in- tellectuals are generally seen to be liberal, and because liberals are gen- erally deemed to be in favor of gun control. As it happens, Korda is a gun collector, a target shooter, and a life member of the N.R.A., but most readers, un- aware of all this, were surprised to see his pro- gun statement. Some tIme before the article appeared, Korda, in a conversation at his office, spelled out his views. "When people talk about guns, what are they really talk- ing about?" he asked. "They're talk- ing about a certain American penchant for violence. They're talking about the conflict between the old, rural view of American life and the modern, urban view of American life. They're tal - ing about liberal and conservative atti- tudes toward self-defense and crime. They're talking about crime and about standing up for their rights to the extreme. They're talking about all sorts of issues that are very intense in American life-including, I need hardly say, racism-and all of which boil down to guns and gun control. The guns themselves have never struck me as being very interesting or, in real American terms, very con- troversial. The truth of the matter is that when people talk about gun con- trol they're really talking about other things. Conservatives are talking about constitutional rights. Rural people are talking about looking after themselves. Big-city people are talking about what are seen as person-to-person crimes -seen by white people as being in- flicted on them largely by blacks, and seen by black people as being inflicted largely on blacks by blacks. And city people, if they're liberal, are also thinking about a certain turning away from old American values, which are basically and predominantly ruraL" Korda went on to say, "What ap- plies to a city like N ew York does not, it seems to me, apply as easily to a state like Montana. What applies to Mon- tana does not apply as easily to a state like Texas or Mississippi. And local custom, local tradition, local law en- forcement vary so much that it is really very hard to talk about a na- tional gun policy-which I think ev- erybody in the federal government does more or less badly. There is no reason to suppose that a national gun policy would be better administered than a na- tional anything-else policy-energy policy, civil-rights policy, or whatever. So I'm not so Ð:.: sure that the system we have-which is that gun laws are left large- ly to local communi- ties-doesn't in some ways make the most sense. And while I'm not in favor of the deci- sion of the Morton Grove people it seems to me that within whatever the constitu- tional limits turn out to be-it may well be that the Constitution does not give a community the right to mandate or to demand that it give up its guns entirely-if Morton Grove is silly, Kennesaw is sillier. The decision as to whether a person wants to arm himself or herself seems to me a very personal one, like a lot of other things. I don't think it should be managed by the state. I don't think it should be pre-